Best of Best WordPress Tutorials of 2017 on WPBeginner

2017 is about to come to an end and what a great year it has been. We want to thank all of your for your continued support of WPBeginner over the past 8 years of our existence. To continue our tradition, in this article we will look back at 2017 to highlight the best of best WordPress tutorials on WPBeginner and share the success that our team had in 2017.

WPBeginner Recap 2017 by Syed Balkhi

2017 has been an amazing year for me both personally and professionally. WPBeginner website set new traffic records, our team grew to over 40 people, and our revenue from our premium WordPress plugins saw significant growth as well.

In last year’s recap, I set a goal that I wanted to reach 100,000 subscribers on YouTube by the end of 2017. We didn’t quite reach that milestone. At the time of writing this article, we have over 79,000 subscribers and over 10 million video views. I am proud that our videos have improved significantly, and we will be putting even more focus on videos in 2018. If you haven’t done so already, I would really appreciate it if you subscribe to our YouTube channel, so we can reach the 100,000 subscriber mark in 2018.

As for personal life, I’m really enjoying fatherhood. Solomon is 1 year old now, and he learned how to walk earlier this year. It’s been an amazing journey watching him grow and learn all sorts of new things. He has already been to two WordCamps. I think he was the youngest attendee at WordCamp U.S this year. Below is a picture of our family, since I know many of you often ask for it.

I took a complete break from writing on my personal blog, so I can spend maximum time with family. I have been clearing my tasks, so I can start blogging there again next year.

Thanks to your support, WPForms has taken the market by storm. It’s being used on over 800,000 websites now and has a 4.9 out of 5 star rating.

We completed the phase 1 revamp of MonsterInsights, the Google analytics plugin we acquired from Yoast last year. In phase 1, our goal was to add proper tracking to every area of your WordPress site and send that data to your Google Analytics. Our phase 2 update will be going out soon which will significantly improve the reporting dashboard. Our goal is to bring back helpful data inside WordPress dashboard to help you make data-driven decision.

Our flagship product, OptinMonster, continued to push the limits in 2017. We launched version 4.0 which came with powerful features like sub-accounts, user permission control, activity logs, custom branding and a new campaign creation workflow. We also added powerful targeting features like InactivitySensor, shareable MonsterLinks, campaign sound effects, and our native Shopify app. We also did a complete redesign of our website.

If you’re not using OptinMonster, then you’re losing subscribers every day. It is the one plugin that every website should have.

We also completely redesigned our corporate, Awesome Motive website. It’s really cool, you should check it out. We’re hiring for a lot of different positions, so don’t forget to browse our career page.

If you want to keep up with more than just WPBeginner, then you can always follow me on Twitter (@syedbalkhi) where I tweet about our other projects, marketing tips, and tons of other cool things.

Now let’s take a look at the best of WPBeginner in 2017.

Best of WPBeginner in 2017

We wrote many helpful WordPress tutorials through out 2017. Here are some of our favorites.

What are WordPress plugins? And how do they work? – In this beginner’s guide, we talked a bit about WordPress plugins. Targeted at absolute beginners, this article explains the concept of WordPress plugins as apps for your website and how they work by hooking into your WordPress.

February

How to properly move from Weebly to WordPress – Before this article, it was quite painful to move a website from Weebly to WordPress. We decided to develop a handy tool that will allow you to easily export and import your Weebly site into WordPress. This article has step by step instructions on how to do it.

March

5 Best WordPress LMS plugins compared (pros and cons) – WordPress is widely used by people and organizations who want to sell courses or use WordPress as their Learning Management System or LMS. In this article, we compared the top WordPress LMS plugins with pros and cons.

How much does it really cost to build a WordPress website – We are often asked by users about how much would it cost them to build a WordPress site. In this detailed article, we break down the prices and tell you how much it would cost to build different types of WordPress sites and how to reduce your costs.

April

5 Best WordPress membership plugins compared – There are many WordPress membership plugins in the market with similar features. In this article, we compared the top WordPress membership plugins to figure out how they stack up against each other.

5 best WordPress firewall plugins compared – Firewall plugins for WordPress block bad bots, malware, and malicious attacks on your website. In this article, we compared the top 5 WordPress firewall plugins with their pros and cons.

June

How to track outbound links in WordPress – Many of our users wanted to know how to track outbound links on their websites. These are the links that take users away from your site. In this article, we showed you how to easily track outbound links in WordPress using Google Analytics.

10 best WordPress plugins for podcasters – WordPress is used by the top podcasters. In this article, we shared the best WordPress plugins for podcasters that will help you easily manage and grow your podcast.

August

How much does a custom WordPress theme cost? – Another one of the most often asked questions is how to get a custom WordPress theme and how much it would actually cost. In this article, we talk about the cost of getting a custom WordPress theme made specifically for your website.

How to manually update WordPress plugins via FTP – Sometimes you may not be able to update a WordPress plugin from the admin area, in that case you will need to use FTP to update it. In this step by step guide, we show you how to manually update WordPress plugins via FTP.

September

How to add a slide out contact form in WordPress – Slide out contact forms divert user’s attention to the contact with the slide in animation. It helps you generate more leads and sales. In this step by step guide, we showed you how to easily add a slide out contact form in WordPress.

7 Best WordPress CDN services (Compared) – Content delivery network or CDN help you serve static cache from different servers and locations. This boosts your site’s speed and decreases page load time. In this article, we have hand-picked the best CDN services that you can use with your WordPress site.

How to find which WordPress theme a site is using – Often we get emails from readers asking us for help in finding the exact theme that a specific website is using. This article shows you how to easily find out which WordPress a specific website is using.

How to appear in Google Answer boxes with your WordPress site – Google Answer boxes highlight the best answer to question in search results by putting it at top in an answer box. In this article, we talked about how you can improve your content to easily appear in Google answer boxes with your WordPress posts.

How to accept Bitcoin payments in WordPress – More and more ecommerce websites are now accepting Bitcoin payments along with traditional payment methods. In this article, we show you how to easily accept Bitcoin payments in WordPress.

How to use SMTP server to send WordPress emails – Many shared WordPress hosting providers don’t have their servers properly configured to send out WordPress emails. This troublesome as you may not be able to get important notifications or even password recovery emails. In this article, we show you how to use SMTP server to send WordPress emails.

How and why you should leave reviews on WordPress – Many WordPress plugins and themes need your encouragement to continue the project, particularly the free ones. In this article, we discussed how and why you should leave reviews on WordPress projects like plugins and themes.

These were some of the best WordPress tutorials on WPBeginner in 2017. We hope that you liked them.

We would like to thank all WPBeginner users, who visited our website, gave feedback, left comments, and shared it with others. We are truly very thankful. We look forward to add more useful WordPress tutorials in 2018.